Winter is finally making itself known in Paris, as the thermometer hovers just above zero. Crossing the Concorde yesterday I took these shots of the arctic merfolk.

There are many out there – I once thought I numbered among them – that will tell you that the March of the West and the post-Enlightenment world, what with its science, its rule of law, and its progress, has reversed the historically diminished returns of life as a woman. Suffrage. Contraception. Microwave ovens. Miatas. I feel like I am only stating the obvious when I say this is a crock of shit. Read the rest of this article »

The other night Mathilde and I were happy to have dinner with her grandmother, Mimi. Mimi is a spectacular woman, every bit the matriarch: ruddy, robust and flush with life in spite of her years, always with a bright, mischevious spark in her eyes. Mathilde has inherited this spark, the glint that looks for and finds joy, but it has not yet matured into the bright opalescence that Mimi’s contains. It is a mineral of love and humanity, I suppose, that can only be polished by time and experience, and which gleams brighter for each test of durability, and brightest when taking in the fruits of a life, the faces of a family well-loved and loving assembled near it. At all the large family dinners I have attended with Mathilde, but especially those at Mimi’s own country house in Normandy, I have watched this light in Mimi’s eyes as she pours the champagne to three generations, plays with the fourth, and pads from the kitchen with steaming osso buco for all. In any case, Mimi is an easy woman to love, and I am thankful that she favors me, because I would like never to see the alternate refractions of her crystalline gaze. Read the rest of this article »